Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, (born January 17, 1600, Madrid, Spain—died May 25, 1681, Madrid), dramatist and poet who succeeded Lope de Vega as the greatest Spanish playwright of the Golden Age. Among his best-known secular dramas are El médico de su honra (1635; The Surgeon of His Honour), La vida es sueño (1635; Life Is a Dream), El alcalde de Zalamea (c. 1640; The Mayor of Zalamea), and La hija del aire (1653; “The Daughter of the Air”), sometimes considered his masterpiece. He also wrote operas and plays with religious or mythological themes.

Early life

Calderón’s father, a fairly well-to-do government official who died in 1615, was a man of harsh and dictatorial temper. Strained family relations apparently had a profound effect on the youthful Calderón, for several of his plays show a preoccupation with the psychological and moral effects of unnatural family life, presenting anarchical behaviour directly traced to the abuse of paternal authority.

Destined for the church, Calderón matriculated at the University of Alcalá in 1614 but transferred a year later to Salamanca, where he continued his studies in arts, law, and probably theology until 1619 or 1620. Abandoning an ecclesiastical career, he entered the service of the constable of Castile and in 1623 began to write plays for the court, rapidly becoming the leading member of the small group of dramatic poets whom King Philip IV gathered around him. In 1636 the king made him a Knight of the Military Order of St. James. Calderón’s popularity was not confined to the court, for these early plays were also acclaimed in the public theatres, and, on the death of Lope de Vega (1635), Calderón became the master of the Spanish stage. On the outbreak of the Catalan rebellion, he enlisted in 1640 in a cavalry company of knights of the military orders and served with distinction until 1642, when he was invalided out of the army. In 1645 he entered the service of the duque de Alba, probably as secretary. A few years later an illegitimate son was born to him; nothing is known about the mother, and the idea that sorrow at her death led him to return to his first vocation, the priesthood, is pure surmise. He was ordained in 1651 and announced that he would write no more for the stage. This intention he kept as regards the public theatres, but at the king’s command he continued to write regularly for the court theatre. He also wrote each year the two Corpus Christi plays for Madrid. Appointed a prebendary of Toledo Cathedral, he took up residence in 1653. The fine meditative religious poem Psalle et sile (“Sing Psalms and Keep Silent”) is of this period. Receiving permission to hold his prebend without residence, he returned to Madrid in 1657 and was appointed honorary chaplain to the king in 1663.

Aesthetic milieu and achievement

The court patronage that Calderón enjoyed constitutes the most important single influence in the development of his art.

The court drama grew out of the popular drama, and at first there was no distinction in themes and style between the two. The construction, however, of a special theatre in the new palace, the Buen Retiro, completed in 1633, made possible spectacular productions beyond the resources of the public stage. The court plays became a distinctive Baroque genre, combining drama with dancing, music, and the visual arts and departing from contemporary life into the world of classical mythology and ancient history. Thus Calderón, as court dramatist, became associated with the rise of opera in Spain. In 1648 he wrote El jardín de Falerina (“The Garden of Falerina”), the first of his zarzuelas, plays in two acts with alternating spoken and sung dialogue. In 1660 he wrote his first opera, the one-act La púrpura de la rosa (“The Purple of the Rose”), with all of the dialogue set to music. This was followed by Celos, aun del aire matan (1660; “Jealousy Even of the Air Can Kill”), an opera in three acts with music by Juan Hidalgo. As in the Italian tradition, the music was subordinate to the poetry, and all of Calderón’s musical plays are poetic dramas in their own right.

Calderón’s drama must be placed within the context of the court theatre, with its conscious development of an unrealistic and stylized art form. For two centuries after his death, his preeminence remained unchallenged, but the realistic canons of criticism that came to the fore toward the end of the 19th century produced a reaction in favour of the more “lifelike” drama of Lope de Vega. Calderón appeared mannered and conventional: the structure of his plots seemed contrived, his characters stiff and unconvincing, his verse often affected and rhetorical. Although he used technical devices and stylistic mannerisms that by constant repetition became conventional, Calderón remained sufficiently detached to make his characters, on occasion, poke fun at his own conventions. This detachment indicates a conception of art as a formal medium that employs its artistic devices so as to compress and abstract the externals of human life, the better to express its essentials.

In this direction, Calderón developed the dramatic form and conventions established by Lope de Vega, based on primacy of action over characterization, with unity in the theme rather than in the plot. He created a tightly knit structure of his own while leaving intact the formal framework of Lope’s drama. From the start he manifested his technical skill by utilizing the characters and incidents of his plots in the development of a dominant idea. As his art matured, his plots became more complex and the action more constricted and compact. The creation of complex dramatic patterns in which the artistic effect arises from perception of the totality of the design through the inseparability of the parts is Calderón’s greatest achievement as a craftsman. El pintor de su deshonra (c. 1645; The Painter of His Own Dishonor) and La cisma de Ingalaterra (c. 1627; “The Schism of England”) are masterly examples of this technique, in which poetic imagery, characters, and action are subtly interconnected by dominant symbols that elucidate the significance of the theme. Although rhetorical devices typical of the Spanish Baroque style remained a feature of his diction, his verse developed away from excessive ornamentation toward a taut style compressed and controlled by a penetrating mind.

Secular plays

The difficulties that Calderón’s art presents to the modern reader have tended to obscure the originality of his themes. Accepting the conventions of the comedy of intrigue, a favourite form on the Spanish stage, he used them for a fundamentally serious purpose. Ladama duende (1629; The Phantom Lady) is a neat and lively example. In Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar (1629; “A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard”), the intrigues of secret courtship and the disguises that it necessitates are so presented that the traditional seclusion of women on which these intrigues are based is shown to create social disorder by breeding enmity and endangering love and friendship. No siempre lo peor es cierto (c. 1640; “The Worst Is Not Always True”) and No hay cosa como callar (1639; “Silence Is Golden”) mark the peak of this development; although the conventions of comedy remain, the overtones are tragic. Both plays also implicitly criticize the accepted code of honour. Calderón’s rejection of the rigid assumptions of the code of honour is evident also in his tragedies. In the famous El alcalde de Zalamea, the secrecy and the vengeance demanded by the code are rejected. This play also presents a powerful contrast between the aristocracy and the people: the degeneration of the aristocratic ideal is exposed, wealth is associated with manual labour, and honour is shown to be the consequence and prerogative of moral integrity regardless of class. Yet Calderón’s humanity has been questioned in connection with El médico de su honra. The critics who allege that he approves of the murder of an innocent wife because honour demands it overlook the fact that the horror one feels at this deed is precisely what he intended.

A keynote of Calderon’s tragic view of life is his deep-seated realization that a man can be responsible through his own wrongdoing for the wrongdoing of another. This realization probably derives from Calderón’s own family experience. In La devoción de la cruz (c. 1625; Devotion to the Cross) and Las tres justicias en una (c. 1637; Three Judgments at a Blow), the heart of the tragedy lies in the fact that the greatest sinner is also the most sinned against—in that others, before he was born, had begun to dig his grave. El pintor de su deshonra is built on a similar plot.

The fully developed court plays are best represented by La hija del aire. This play in two parts dramatizes the legend of Semiramis (the warrior queen of Babylon whose greed for political power led her to conceal and impersonate her son on his accession). It is often considered Calderón’s masterpiece. Highly stylized, it conveys a strong impression of violence. It presents, with considerable complexity, the contrast between passion and reason. Passion, in its self-seeking, in its grasping for power and devouring of everything in the urge to domination, breeds disorder and leads to destruction; reason, in its sacrificing of self-interest to justice and loyalty, produces order. This basic contrast underlies the themes of Calderón’s last period, its various aspects being expanded in a number of interesting variations, many directly concerned with the positive values of civilization. Though none has the intensity of La hija del aire, most exemplify a thoughtful, dignified, and restrained art. Mythological themes predominate, with a more or less allegorical treatment, as in Eco y Narciso (1661; “Echo and Narcissus”), La estatua de Prometeo (1669; “The Statue of Prometheus”), and Fieras afemina amor (1669; “Wild Beasts Are Tamed by Love”).

Religious plays

Calderón’s vision of the human world in his secular plays is one of confusion and discord arising out of the inevitable clash of values in the natural order. His religious plays round off his view of life by confronting natural values with supernatural ones. The most characteristic of these religious plays, following the tradition established outside Spain by the Jesuit drama, are based on stories of conversion and martyrdom, usually of the saints of the early church. One of the most beautiful is El príncipe constante (1629; The Constant Prince), which dramatizes the martyrdom of Prince Ferdinand of Portugal. El mágico prodigioso (1637; The Wonder-Working Magician) is a more complex religious play. Los dos amantes del cielo (The Two Lovers of Heaven) and El Joséf de las mujeres (c. 1640; “The Joseph of Womankind”) are the most subtle and difficult. The basic human experience upon which Calderón relies for rational support of religious faith is decay and death and the consequent incapacity of the world to fulfill its promise of happiness. This promise is centred in such natural values as beauty, love, wealth, and power that, although true values if pursued with prudence, cannot satisfy the mind’s aspiration for truth or the heart’s longing for happiness. Only the apprehension of an “infinite Good” can assuage the restlessness of men.

This religious philosophy is given its most moving expression, in terms of Christian dogma, in the autos sacramentales. Seventy-six of these allegorical plays, written for open-air performance on the Feast of Corpus Christi, are extant. In them Calderón brought the tradition of the medievalmorality play to a high degree of artistic perfection. The range of his scriptural, patristic, and scholastic learning, together with the assurance of his structural technique and poetic diction, enabled him to endow the abstract concepts of dogmatic and moral theology with convincing dramatic life. At their weakest the autos tend to depend for their effect upon the ingenuity of their allegories, but at their best they are imbued with profound moral and spiritual insight and with a poetic feeling varying from tenderness to forcefulness. La cena de Baltasar (c. 1630; Belshazzar’s Feast) and El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1635; The Great Theatre of the World) are fine examples of Calderón’s early style. The greater complexity of his middle period is represented by No hay más fortuna que Dios (c. 1652; “There Is No Fortune but God”) and Lo que va del hombre a Dios (1652–57; “The Gulf Between Man and God”). But his highest achievement in this type of drama is to be found among those autos of his old age that dramatize the dogmas of the Fall and the redemption, notably La viña del Señor (1674; “The Lord’s Vineyard”), La nave del mercader (1674; “The Merchant’s Ship”), El nuevo hospicio de pobres (1675; “The New Hospital for the Poor”), El día mayor de los días (1678; “The Greatest Day of Days”), and El pastor fido (1678; “The Faithful Shepherd”). Here is found Calderón’s most moving expression of his compassionate understanding of human waywardness.

To have found a dramatic form that conveys the doctrines of the Christian faith gives Calderón a special place in literature, but his greatness is not confined to this. The depth and consistency of his thought, his supremely intelligent craftsmanship and artistic integrity, his psychological insight, and the rationality and humanity of his moral standards make him one of the major figures of world drama.